Re: [whatwg/encoding] Explain the relationship between windows-1252, Latin1, and ASCII (PR #345)

aphillips left a comment (whatwg/encoding#345)

> Well, except for all the ones that implement the Encoding Standard, including web browsers, right? Your statement seems pretty wrong in light of that.

You're right. I did not mean those implementing the Encoding Standard. I had in mind non-Web converters that implement Latin-1 as an actual independent encoding.

> I think it's pretty important to be clear about how the original standards didn't give mappings here

I think that's the primary thing that caused my reaction. ISO 8859 didn't specify characters in the C0 and C1 ranges, but it reserved those code points with an expectation that they'd be filled in by ISO 6429. It wasn't like escapes and controls were unknown (particularly the C0 variety). In practice, coders incorporated the controls. Unicode itself is isomorphic with 8859-1 plus 6429.

I don't think I need to repeat the history and why Encoding is based on windows-1252. What I was trying to say hurriedly before was basically: at least some developers remain familiar with non-Encoding-based coders (iconv, JDK, ICU, various databases, etc. etc.) where the label for ISO 8859-1 is an isomorphic encoding. Those developers may have used the encoding to smuggle bytes into or out of strings... and Encoding breaks that assumption (which is the whole point of your PR).

All that said... I re-read the text you have this morning, with an eye towards suggesting replacement text, and it seemed adequate this time around. So never mind. I will still raise this with I18N to decide if we might provide some exterior documentation about the history, but nothing Encoding would need to pay attention to or wait on.

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